Trees, Climate Change & our Landscapes…

I’ve been doing a lot of research since writing my blog post on trans-migrational landscapes, my theory on how we have to adapt our natural environments – or rather, help them adapt – to combat the rapidly increasing effects of climate change. It’s not going to be easy; right now I’m not sure if we can do it without making a complete fudge of things, or if we would simply be making matters worse. I’ve just read this article in the Telegraph, which would seem to agree with my idea, but as some of the comments after point out, it’s the insect and microbial ecologies that count; many of our native population just can’t live on non-native plants.

I’m also reading a book by ecologist Douglas Tallamy, called Bringing Nature Home; in which he talks eloquently about these problems, about the environmental collateral-damage caused by horticulture and agriculture. That plants, insect and fungi go rogue is understood; that they might only do so after 80+ years of benign cultivation and growth in a new continent is astonishing. Alien plants displace more fragile natives and they can rampage, simply because they are not subject to the checks and balances caused by a predatory ecology. What we, as gardeners, admire about an introduced plant – that it doesn’t get eaten by “pests” – shows that it is ecologically barren, is not taking part in the local micro-ecology and so is not being transformed into higher trophic levels of being, ie. into the higher food chain of insects, birds and mammals.

So if, as Tony Russell suggests in his Telegraph article, we were to plant non-native woodlands, they would become ecologically less diverse as a result, even if the trees were better able to grow in an altered climate. So should we then introduce all or some of the microbes and insects that naturally live in such trees? That could be very dangerous, with results that are entirely unforeseeable. Of course, we might have to gamble as the climate gets more and more extreme and moving Mediterranean ecologies to Southern England might save them as they die out in the place where they have evolved to live in.

My fear is that we are not smart enough to understand and control (as if we ever could) such a process, my hope is that we could take the issue seriously enough to learn how to do this successfully. We will need it, if we are to retain useful and beautiful ecologies on which we depend for our survival. Nature doesn’t need it, because she won’t mind taking a long, LONG, time to rebuild things…